I’ve been planning a new, full-frame bag for the Karate Monkey for over a year.  I built it during study breaks over the last few days.  By far the best, and fastest, one I’ve made.  The big size makes the final seams a lot easier to handle.

This one has a gusseted mesh pocket for snacks on the forward drive side, a zippered mesh pocket for tools on the rear non-drive side, a stretch divider, and a partial panel opening. 

The upper zipper is a double slider, metal #5 YKK that used to be part of some full-zip wind pants.  The little vertical zipper came off something else (not sure what, my scrap box is pretty big).  Pieces of yoga mat sewn directly to the side panels on the DT and ST provide structure and keep things quiet in the rough.

I had full yardage to work from this time, so the side panels are from one 57″ by 3.25″ piece.  Much easier to sew the corners with fewer fabric layers.  I also integrated a little drain into the bottom, it’s the orange piece you can see in the first picture.  The openings on either end are unsew, just a 2″ tunnel between layers of fabric.  We’ll see how it works.  The orange fabric itself is backed with grey ballistics, and is packcloth older than me cut from a pair of gaiters my mom used to have.  A little something to enhance the bag’s mojo.

I’m psyched, it should be super useful.  As you can see, the last seam on the stretch center divider was a bitch to get to, and I didn’t make it straight, and didn’t care enough to take it out and fix it.  I thought about making it a zippered one, but I’ll never not use it and I always try to use as few zippers as possible.  Not pretty, but strong and functional. 

Blogger is being weird about photo loading, the new version of blogger I updated to when I changed the format, that is.  One picture keeps deleting others when I load too many.  More content in another post, then.